There’s an undeniable eloquence and thoughtfulness that American actor Tati Gabrielle brings to her craft.
For the spirited San Franciscan, the performing arts have surrounded her from an early age—happily throwing herself into school theatre productions and continuing to pursue them throughout her academic studies. After taking her first credit under her birth name, Tatiana Hobson, in the 2014 short film To Stay the Sword, the bright lights of Los Angeles came calling a year later. Fast forward to 2017 and, with more projects under her belt, Tati took on a string of roles including CW’s The 100 and Netflix’s Chilling Adventures of Sabrina as the fiercely poised Prudence Night—a character that catapulted her into the spotlight.
Things have only continued to rise since then. From starring in Sony’s Uncharted alongside Tom Holland to her role as Marienne Bellamy in Netflix’s global hit You, Tati’s trajectory has been rapid and impressive. And it’s showing no signs of slowing down—she’s stepping into the intense world of The Last of Us season two with Pedro Pascal, Bella Ramsey, and Kaitlyn Dever, while also leading Naughty Dog’s upcoming video game Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet. On top of that, she’s set to appear as Jade in the Mortal Kombat sequel later this year.
With every role, she brings energy and a deep commitment to understanding what makes each character tick. As we chat over Zoom, what comes across most clearly is how grounded and real she is. Despite standing at the edge of a whole new stage in her career—one that could easily invite ego—Tati remains humble, authentic, and genuinely grateful for the path that’s brought her here. At her core, she simply wants to serve her characters to the best of her ability and use her rapidly growing platform to do good—whether that’s championing sustainable fashion or staying mindful about the environment.
Now, a decade into her TV and film career, the rest of the world is finally meeting Tati on a grander scale—and it couldn’t be more deserved.
For her debut 1883 Magazine cover, Tati Gabrielle sits down with 1883’s Cameron Poole to talk about the final season of You, filming Pedro Pascal’s intense death scene in The Last of Us, her journey so far, and more.
Hi Tati, thanks for speaking with 1883 Magazine. How did you find your shoot in NYC the other week?
It was awesome. It was a lot of fun. We got some really cool looks, and I had a lot of fun with the team in there. Yeah, it was sweet.
Amazing. April has been a big month for you, with both You and The Last of Us dropping. With so much momentum right now, do you ever find yourself thinking back to those early days—like your first short films?
Yeah, for sure. It makes me very reminiscent. I was thinking about it even today, pinching myself and just thinking how little Tati, the little girl, would be so stoked to see what’s happening right now. Her mind would be blown. It definitely makes me hark back on how it’s been a road to get here.
It makes me emotional to think about, I look forward to how much more there is still ahead of me. I never see any particular moment as the be-all and end all. I just get excited to stay present with it all and watch it unfold to my surprise. It’s fun to be always pleasantly surprised.
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I bet. When a project is about to be released, whether it’s a massive series, film or something smaller, what goes through your mind at that moment? Because so much work goes on for months prior to the release.
I guess what goes through my mind is we, as in myself and the people that I worked with, it was ours for so long, our little secret, and now it’s time to be shared. It is kind of my favourite—I guess maybe not my favourite part, because both parts are equally exciting for me. But it’s such fun because we get to share that with the world and see how it impacts them. I feel the impact that the audience receives is never the same impact that it necessarily had on us during the filming process. So that’s always another pleasant surprise of seeing the way that it moves people, or the way that it touches people, or the way that it makes them think about this or that, to see what they expected and what they didn’t.
Just what goes through my mind is just ‘okay, this little baby that we’ve all created, now is its time to grow up into the next phase of its life’. I get nervous, I get excited. I also think about the difference between what’s mine and what’s theirs, as far as the audience and whoever it is that is receiving it. I had the moments that I had with it, and it’s time to let that go. It’s going to be taken and felt however it’s going to be felt. It’s a big release moment for me.
You’ve been part of the hit show You since season three, with the show now finally coming to a close, what do you really cherish about your time as Marienne and working alongside previous 1883 cover star Penn Badgley and the rest of the cast?
The thing that I’ve loved most about Marienne is getting to both experience and heal with her, and getting to make my own escape in life around the time that she was able to make her escape. It is very cool that I’m the one who survives [laughs]. That’s always the really fun thing for me to think about. But I think one of the things that I cherish the most was just spending time with Penn. He’s one of my favourite people that I’ve ever worked with, just in his presence and in his generosity.
From the moment that I stepped on that set in season three, he had open arms and was like, “If you need anything, if you have questions, if you feel uncomfortable, anything, just talk to me, ask me’ and we did and then had so many more amazing conversations about life, philosophy and all kinds of things. Spending time with Penn has always been wonderful, and it was one of my favourite parts of that experience. Just watching the trajectory of this show, I think that they’ve done such a smart job with the arc of Joe. How long can you watch this guy who kills people and gets away with it? Watching the arc and change of his psyche and how that starts to dissolve and evolve into something that I think nobody could have ever really expected.
He’s always made excuses for himself and justified himself, but the levels to which that went to were so mind-blowing to be a part of and to witness and to watch Penn dive deeper into that. It was such a trippy experience and like an acting masterclass in a lot of ways. I’m going to miss this show a lot, but it’s a very exciting close. I think we all have been wanting to see where it’s all going to end.
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When season four of You wrapped, what did you make of Marienne’s ending and Joe’s final fate?
What I will say is that I don’t know his actual full end. I wanted to experience it with everybody else. When the show was first introduced to me, it was introduced to me on my own before I became a part of it, and it was something that I loved.
I wanted to still savour that experience of being an audience member and of watching this journey. I was able to be a part of that journey to a degree, and so I didn’t even read the script. I truly wanted to save this as a little piece of excitement and fun for myself. I actually can’t answer that question and will be able to answer it very soon [laughs].
I love that. That’s really great. You’ll get to enjoy it even more. Moving on, you play medic Nora in The Last of Us Season 2. Viewers recently saw the big Joel death scene, which you were involved in. What was it like filming something so emotionally intense and shocking?
So weighty! It was so interesting. Within the crew that is the Wolves, that is the WLF, Craig [Mazin] made such a point of having all of us be at really very different points of the spectrum— Abby being the full vengeance seeking, and Mel being the complete opposite of, and then me, Owen, and Manny all simmering somewhere in the middle. That in itself was such an itchy and interesting dynamic to play with, and such a good challenge to play with.
Then just being on the set on those days, feeling Kaitlyn’s energy more than anything, for me personally, was such a charging force and energy through that. It was hard for it not to feel visceral and feel real. Despite after a take, Pedro [then] gets up [with] his bloody makeup and makes a joke. But it was such an impactful experience and really started to make me think about this idea of choice and what happens to our souls, our minds when we make certain choices.
I feel these characters, they’re still kids in a way. They’re young. When you were a kid, or when you were a teenager, or in your early 20s, there were so many choices that you made that you thought would be a fleeting instant, but through life, you’ve seen those things come back up again, of like, ‘oh, wow, I did not realise that choice was going to follow me along’.
Filming that [scene] for me was weighty in so many degrees, just in the visceralness of the moments themselves, and then what it started to make me think about choices within my own life.
The game itself is a storytelling masterclass, touching on themes like revenge, forgiveness, and the moral grey area in between. It’s easy for audiences to view Nora as ‘one of the bad guys’, but the truth is a lot more complicated. How did you approach capturing that complexity in your performance?
I really wanted to pin that down, actually with Craig, before we even got to shooting. I had a lot of conversations with Ariela [Barer] too, and knowing Nora’s backstory and Mel’s backstory—they worked closely with Abby’s father and helped to find this cure, and he was a mentor to them. But they were sitting on different points of this spectrum. So for Nora, I battled with, both as Tati and as Nora, what does it mean to be both a doctor and a soldier? What does it mean to be a killer and a saviour? Is there even really a way to actually balance that, especially being in a place and in a world where you don’t have time necessarily to always decide where you want to stand morally. You’re being faced with survival every single day.
Especially, like I said, being young, do you make that choice, or do you literally just go day by day, moment by moment, to just survive and do what you’ve got to do to survive? I think that with this group in particular, all they had was each other—Nora and her loyalty to Abby, does she have the liberty to really consider this? And I don’t think that she does consider it until it’s happening in front of her.
Before that, it’s just being a loyal friend, she is going ‘to ride with you’, she is going to die with you. That’s what I mean by the visceralness of Kaitlyn’s energy on the day, and letting that impact Nora and being like: ‘well, we’re really doing this. I didn’t take a second to think about what this was going to be, what that was going to look like, what we were actually doing, something that we have never done before’. It’s different to kill one of the infected out in the field, versus this is a living, breathing human man that, yes, he has made bad choices, but who of us hasn’t? Is this bad choice now going to haunt us the way that we have haunted and hunted him?
Yeah, I think it was a never-ending question for me, even through the days themselves, I think playing with Nora’s complexity. In every moment, her mind was changing, whether it was her trying to convince herself that this was okay, or whether it was her trying to find the things in the environment that were making it okay, trying to put the facts together to make it okay, or just disassociating entirely.
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If the show follows the same path as the video game, Nora and Ellie will meet again in a very intense way. Tell me what it was like working with Bella in the series?
Well, without giving too much away, I will let the audience make the stance on how close or not it is to the game. But what I will say is that working with Bell was a dream. Bell is one of the sweetest people I’ve ever met.
They’re so present and powerful, so it makes every moment then become very intentional. Then you want to be intentional with them. I don’t want to say anything else, because I don’t want to give anything away. I’m terrible with spoilers, so that’s all I’ll say. I love Bell, It was awesome.
You first worked with Naughty Dog back in 2020 on Uncharted—would you be open to sharing how that role evolved into such a strong creative relationship with both them and Sony?
The interesting thing is, I didn’t meet Neil [Druckmann] or any of the Naughty Dog team at the time of doing Uncharted. What I did not know is, when the movie came out, Neil very much saw me. He told me later that he was like, “you were one of my favourite parts of that film.” I was like, “Seriously? I’m not even in the game.” He’s like, “I know. And you still were—” And that was such a what?! moment for me.
In Neil seeing me from Uncharted when my tape came across for The Last of Us, he vouched for me in that way and that was so crazy. When I started Uncharted, when I first stepped into that, I didn’t know about the game before starting the film. Once I started the film, I began playing all of the games and fell in love with Naughty Dog’s form of storytelling. Like you said, they deal with some very complex questions and make their characters sit in a reality.
Yes, it’s a game world and you’re doing fun and crazy things—but the fact that for all of their characters, in certain ways, you don’t have choice, that you have to be as flawed as this character is, was something that inspired me and it was a different form of video gaming that I had always longed for but never knew was out there. And so to then join The Last of Us and then Intergalactic, it was like, ‘oh, wow, I feel so, so honoured to have been discovered by Neil in that way’, and then for Craig seeing me in my The Last of Us audition and being just so loving and championing. It’s something that I think about— just to be grateful for everything you step into.
You never know what can come of it. It’s, to me, a really beautiful testament to the universe and its mysteriousness and inter-workings. Just stay present in everything, and there’s always going to be a gift to follow. I don’t know how this happened. But I’m so freaking grateful for it. I’m truly mind blown.
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Hype yourself up as well, because they appreciated and saw your talent, which you have. Speaking about Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet—how did that project first come to you, and what does it mean to you to be the face of their newest IP? It really shows Neil Druckmann and the team believe in you in such a powerful way
Thank you. By the time I got the message for Intergalactic, I had, of course, already played Uncharted, I played The Last of Us, and had fallen in love with the world that they created. Like I said, the realness in which they’ve made their characters, and the experience they take the gamer through, of making them face these questions even for themselves. I remember the day that I got the message, because my manager had messaged and wasn’t as familiar with video games. She was like, “Neil Druckmann wants to meet with you for his next game.” She’s like, “Would you like to?” I said, “Would I like to?! What do you mean? Absolutely!” I remember sitting down when he showed me everything and sent me everything, and before he could even finish, I said, “Yes!” He said, “Okay. Well, you know what you’re signing up for? It’s going to be a while till the game comes out.” I said, “Yes, I understand. I understand everything.”
To be a part of it, I’ve been dealing with this new question of faith—and what it means to have faith in oneself, in a system, both internally and externally. It’s something that has always been a poignant part of my life, in both untraditional and traditional senses of the word. But to know that I can have a different and more interactive version of impact… for me, everything I do—whether it’s TV, film, or a play—I do not only to play in these spaces, but for the impact I can have on an audience.
So to step into the video game world and be the face of this thing, people watch shows, but I feel there’s something even more tangible in the video game space, that you are in direct contact with this person. You are in communion with them in an almost ritualistic way. It makes me think even deeper about the decisions that I’m making within that space of performing itself. In one way, when watching TV, you can see yourself in a character, but with a video game, you are the character. And so for me to be able to reach any kind of person at any kind of time that might be playing this game is really important to me. To know that it’s going to automatically reach so many people due to the thing that Naughty Dog has built already is scary. It’s very scary and nerve-wracking at times.
But it’s a challenge and a job that I’m willing to step forward into, and I just hope that I can not only make Neil proud and Naughty Dog proud, but make myself proud through it.
No doubt you will. You’ve championed sustainable fashion brands on the red carpet before, but how do you like to incorporate sustainable fashion in your everyday life, and why is it so important to you?
In my everyday life, I do a lot of thrift shopping. Most of my clothing is either secondhand bought or secondhand taken from my friends. It’s important to me because the biggest reason is that I want my kids to see a green world. I want my kids to be able to experience a level of beauty that feels threatened right now. It feels very threatened, with talks of going to space and talks of making artificial versions of the beauty that we are surrounded with. We can almost see it—I think that Mother Nature is very much willing to fight back.
I think with the way that things are happening, the natural disasters, it very much feels like Mother Nature’s like, ‘okay, I’m tired of you all not appreciating me’. I think that when we give to the land, the land gives back to us. It’s a very indigenous way of thinking, but there’s so much more weight in it than I think we realise. We take for granted the peace and serenity that we feel just going on a hike, walking through a park. When we take that for granted, and then it’s just gone, then what are we to do? Sit with a VR headset and look at that from a digital point of view? It is never going to be the same. It doesn’t hit the senses in the same way. It doesn’t cause the same level of endorphins and serotonin to be released in the body.
For me, sustainable fashion is just one really small piece of what that can be, but it’s something that we all experience every day. We all have to put clothes on every day. It’s one of the easiest ways that we can be conscious of what we do.
I’m curious, I know you practised karate when you were growing up, has that, if at all, helped your training for becoming Jade in the Mortal Kombat sequel?
Oh, absolutely. I had to learn a different style because, as we know, Jade’s weapon is her bō staff. I did bō when I was doing karate. For Jade, I had to learn a different version. I had learned Chinese bō versus Japanese bō. Having the foundation already there helped so much. I had to unlearn some things to learn new things, but yeah, a total foundation set there.
Fantastic. It’s another beloved character you’re going to be taking on. How are you feeling about that?
Again, just tripped out because Mortal Kombat was a big game for me when I was a kid, because of doing karate and things like that—Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter, kind of both. Some people say that you had to be one or the other, and I liked both. Jade, particularly, was one of the only characters at that time in that world who looked like me. Talk about making little Tati proud—it was a really big moment for me, look at the way that life does come full circle.
Now, hopefully, being Jade on the screen will then make some other girl who looks like me go, ‘oh, my God, I can do that. I can be a total badass’. Yeah, just hopefully the cycle keeps going in that way. My life’s really trippy, really trippy [laughs].
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The entertainment industry can be incredibly tough—you’re constantly fighting for space, audition after audition. It must feel really special to see not only your own success, but also your friends thriving too—especially childhood friends like Kehlani and Zendaya, who you went to middle school with. What’s it been like watching each other grow and evolve in such a competitive world?
Excuse my French, but it makes you say: fuck yeah! Seeing all the trials and tribulations we went through as kids, as teenagers—and then watching it all pay off—it’s surreal. Someone asked me this morning, my barber, he was like, “If 15-year-old Tati came knocking on your door right now, what would you say to her?” And I said, “Everything you’re thinking and doing, and all the tears, I promise you, it’s going to pay off.”
It’s a story I want to tell every young person—especially those with friend groups from a young age. Band together. It’s so much more rewarding to not only make it on your own, but to share that success with people who’ve been there from the beginning.
It really is surreal. Just last week, I walked past this huge Louis Vuitton billboard of Zendaya, and I was like, “Let’s go!” Kehlani and Zendaya—we had a little crew in middle school. If that crew could sit around a table now and see everything we’re doing, they’d be like, “No way. You’re kidding.” It’d be like, “You guys are lying.” And it’s like, “No, I promise. You made it happen.” Yeah… It’s just a really special thing.
Finally, what would you like to manifest for yourself this year and why? It could be something from your personal life or your career.
That’s so hard to just pick one thing. I would just want to manifest the next big challenge. I think I mean that for both. Because I think there have been times in my life where my career and my personal life have verged in this really beautiful way, and a certain challenge in my career has challenged me personally or vice versa. I’m producing this year, and so I would like to see that next step in my career goal and get my first projects out of pre-production and into full production.
That’s something that I’m really manifesting for myself. Then I would love to manifest what the next level of impact that I can make in the world is beyond just being a talent or being more than just a voice. What more actions can I take?
Yeah, those are the things I think I’m manifesting for myself this year right now. I’m sure that’s going to change by the end of the year, and I look forward to that.
Thanks for your time, Tati, I know you’ve done countless interviews, and I know they can sometimes be tedious and boring, but you spending the time and just chatting about your passions, it’s not lost on me. I do really appreciate it.
I super appreciate you, Cameron. Thank you for taking the time. Thank you for wanting to speak to me today. It’s an honour just the same.
Follow Tati Gabrielle @tatigabrielle
Interview Cameron Poole
Photography Alexandra Arnold
Stylist/Fashion Director Laura Spriet
Hair Jenni Wimmerstedt
Makeup Bri Stine
Nails Mamie Onishi
Photography Assistant Daniel Roa
Fashion Assistant Maria Ebert
